Talent Optimization is one term that you should familiarize yourself with quickly if you want to make the most impact with your employees in 2019. While this term is ramping up traction, we predict that you will be hearing an increasing amount about talent optimization and its lasting impact for years to come.
What is Talent Optimization?
Talent optimization is the act of aligning your business strategy with your talent strategy in the interest of maximizing business results. But what is talent optimization at the most granular level, exactly? According to the Predictive Index, “Talent optimization is a four-part discipline…with the core being the collection, analysis, and application of people data.”
Simply put, talent optimization can be further broken down into 4 key aptitudes. They are as follows:
Diagnose: The act of measuring and analyzing the data about your people in order to define remedies.
Design: The act of creating and defining a strategy for your people.
Hire: Use your people data insights to hire top talent and build high-performing teams that are aligned with your desired goals.
Inspire: Use people data to drive important employee-oriented activities.
Why is Talent Optimization Important?
The success of a company’s business initiatives is vastly attributed to the impact of its employees, however there regularly lies a large gap between the goals of an organization and the steps needed for the employees to make it happen. After all as the Predictive Index summarizes, “People are a company’s greatest (and most costly) asset, yet companies aren’t empowering their people to perform at their max capacity—because they don’t know where to begin.”
How is Talent Optimization Applied and Who is Responsible?
Talent Optimization is a role whose responsibility should be owned within a company’s C-Suite. Much like a company dedicates a Business Development professional to the growth of it’s client base, it makes perfect sense that there is a similar but inward-facing professional whose entire responsibility focuses on employees. Dedicating a single person who is focused on ensuring that the company has defined the action needed, designed a strategy to complete defined actions, ensured the company has hired the right employees for the job, and has inspired them with the appropriate methods, is the only surefire way to keep everyone on track and moving in the right direction.
Allowing this responsibility to rest on the shoulders of an already stretched-thin HR department is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. There is simply no way that an HR department could expand wide enough to implement the role of a dedicated Talent Optimization officer. Instead, allowing the role to rise to the C-Suite level allows for the role to act autonomously and ultimately in the best interest of the company as a whole.
Are you ready to finally take action with your team and business that produces real results? Perspective Consulting Founder and CEO, Amy Leslie is ready to help you get there. Let’s chat.
